If housing minister Caroline Flint has her way, these hallmarks of undergraduate living could soon vanish to restore suburban order to student-saturated streets.In some areas, students outnumber local residents. Belfast's Queen's University students inhabit more than half of houses in the immediate vicinity of the campus while around two-thirds of the 10,000 residents of Headingley, in Leeds, are students, all packed into 73 streets of terraced houses.

Town-gown relations are notoriously tense during term time in cities such as Leeds, Nottingham and Southampton.

The government's plan is to halt the "studentification" of university towns by capping the number of houses in multiple occupation (HMO).

Flint wants councils to get together with universities to plan more purpose-built accommodation. She says her main concern is communities left as "ghost towns" when students desert them during the summer months.

But let's not forget why these ghettos sprung up in the first place.

Thanks in part to the government's ambitious target to get 50% of young people into higher education, the UK's student population has swelled to 2.5 million.

Couple this with an average student debt of £17, 500 and you can't blame students – and landlords for that matter – for searching out the cheapest, most convenient housing, however overcrowded or antisocial this may be for their neighbours.

Flint's drive to "blend student populations into well-mixed neighbourhoods" seems a seriously delayed reaction to a problem that has been building up for years. And announcing her plans in the middle of a dip in the housing market is unlikely to get landlords on board with changes in legislation.

A spokesman for the housing charity Shelter said: "This seems to be a cheap dig at students, many of whom are forced to live in HMOs because it's the only way they can afford to attend university.

"Students are often some of the most exploited people in the private rented sector, having to live in poor but expensive accommodation because it's located near the college or university.

"If the government really wants to tackle the issue, it should be looking at the sector as a whole and not just blame students."

And Wes Streeting, president of the National Union of Students, fears that "added bureaucracy will discourage landlords from the HMO market".

The truth is that universities and clusters of their students bring in a substantial income to many towns and cities.

According to Universities UK, higher education institutions generate £45m each year, and for every 100 university employees, a further 99 jobs are created in the wider economy as a knock-on effect.

So, in theory, top marks to Flint for recognising that many UK university towns are swamped with students.

In practice though, with so many millions of young people in full-time higher education, the ghost-town problem is unlikely to disappear.